


The Symptom of the Gale

by middlemarch



Category: Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Boston, Christmas Shopping, Cookies, Doctors & Physicians, F/M, Family, Friendship/Love, Gen, Newbury Street, Romance, second-hand bookstore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-30
Updated: 2016-12-30
Packaged: 2018-09-13 07:23:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9112552
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: She had struggled through two semesters of Ancient Greek and had done surgery on micro-preemies. This was supposed to be easy.





	

Once upon a time, Mary would have spent this afternoon baking, tray after tray of cookies—snickerdoodles, powdery white pfeffernusse, gingerbread, delicate petit four if she had someone to impress, and then would have carefully lined the cardboard boxes with red tissue spangled with gold stars or grey tissue with silvery white snowflakes and loaded each one, sealed it and tied an artfully curled ribbon around with a calligraphied name-tag. It was an enormous amount of work, but the ingredients were cheap, unless you counted the time, and Quicken hadn’t found an accurate way to do that yet, so she didn’t try. She’d grown up in a household that valued thrift; she liked to think they would have even if they hadn’t had to, but frugality hadn’t been an option with four kids on a public school teacher and part-time school nurse’s salaries and she’d had it drummed into her that the best gifts were homemade, costly in time and effort, not dollars and cents. As she’d grown up, she’d appreciated her parents’ perspective and had stuck with it, even when Henry had unsuccessfully cajoled her to just buy something for the department Secret Santa instead of staying up into the wee hours after a long day at the clinic. This year was different, though.

The jump to the attending’s salary had happened in California, but she and Henry had agreed to try and pay down her med school debt as quickly as possible, so they hadn’t changed much about their lifestyle; they stayed in the same dinky apartment, ate at the same cheap restaurants, splurging on the specialty margarita maybe, instead of a pitcher of beer, and they hadn’t given any extravagant gifts at the holidays to each other or their families. She’d made the same batches of cookies and had been happy with the Lego sets and Lincoln Logs she’d sent to all their nieces and nephews. The plan had worked and she’d basically wiped out her loans by the time Belinda called with the offer to move to Boston. They’d talked, delicately, about putting the extra money towards a down payment on a house, what childcare might cost, but soon after their arrival, it had started to go wrong somehow, the regular irritability of a long-term relationship morphing into something else, something she tried to avoid looking at because she didn’t want to have to know what it meant. She kept up the auto-deposit to the account marked “down-payment” and focused on work and how to get from day to day living with a man she had once felt was her soul-mate and now felt like a civil stranger. He’d very politely told her that he was taking a trip back to California before the holiday and was going to spend the day itself with his grandparents and just as politely didn’t invite her to fly out to Cleveland to see them, remarking that of course, she’d be up in Manchester and they would see each other before the New Year. She wondered if the end would come without a bang or a whimper, just silence, the careful removal of everything that was his from her life; she’d made a half-hearted attempt to say maybe they should have a talk (A Talk) but when he’d said he didn’t think it was such a good idea, she hadn’t pressed him even though she saw the hurt in his eyes when she hadn’t defied him.

Now she was walking Newbury Street and trying to buy him a present, among all the others she had to purchase. She had decided not to worry about the cost, since it seemed like the down-payment fund wasn’t going to be needed for its eponymous purpose any time soon, if ever, and it would make a change to shop for what she thought he would genuinely love, not merely be satisfied with. She had the hospital Secret Santa to buy for as well as her family, but those were far easier; she had, blessedly, perhaps cleverly, been assigned Emma Green as her Secret Santa, and was confident that the vivid silk scarf she’d chosen would suit the other woman and be a reasonable gift for a female surgeon on clinic days. Her sister Caroline was so organized she made Mary look like Felix Unger and had sent a comprehensive email with links and coupon codes for her family and her brothers George and Mitchell were huge Sox fans, perhaps to an unhealthy degree, but who could tell in Boston? She had thought the afternoon would be pleasant, financial caution thrown to the wind, and if it was not quite as enjoyable without the company of a good friend—Charlotte still overseas with Doctors Without Borders, Rachel approximately 90 months pregnant with twins, Devin already roped into his family’s elaborate pre-Christmas scavenger hunt tradition, she had still thought she’d have a good time and perhaps figure out a way to deal with the wound in her relationship, a way to heal it; she had her faults, but she was an excellent surgeon.

Except, that was not happening at all. She hadn’t been able to think of what would make Henry so happy she’d see that smile, the slow one she loved so much, a gift that would tell him she understood, him and everything between them. The shop windows were gaily decorated, all silver ornaments and icicles or fractal, laser-cut snowflakes, full of so many enticing objects but nothing said _Henry_ and nothing inspired her to search for whatever was the right thing for him. She could have dealt with that alone—but it seemed like every store held something that seemed perfect, urgently desirable, for Jed Foster, her colleague and she was not quite sure what else. Friend was the obvious answer but it felt…inadequate. There was a small, exquisite watercolor of the sea off Martha’s Vineyard and a sailboat that reminded her of him and a thick book about Padua, a heavy, silky muffler knit from hand-spun wool that someone had reductively called “forest green” as if everyone would know that meant acorns and pine needles crushed underfoot, leaves glossy brown and mellowing red, the rich cream of a mushroom’s gills, leather gloves lined with cashmere for a surgeon’s hands, a burlap sack of coffee beans poking from an oversized mug, possibly big enough for the cup he always chugged before a surgery, so many things she thought, she knew would make him grin, his dark eyes bright, a few than would make him look at her curiously, his smile very sweet but tentative, unconvinced she had intended what the gift suggested, offering to overlook it but not wanting to…

She resisted buying him anything. She ducked into store after store, resolved to find something for Henry; she even talked with saleswomen working on commission, allowed herself to be that dithering, feckless girlfriend who just couldn’t pick anything, the woman they’d complain about on a break or at a bar later the same night. She finally picked a book at a second-hand bookstore, the kind of place she and Henry gone to on early dates, circling each other, the books they shared proxies for themselves, the other discoveries they longed to make. She found a second edition of _Cannery Row_ and thought it would do; less obvious a choice for Henry than _The Grapes of Wrath_ , but a book he’d talked about, a book he could return to even if he didn’t return to her, something he could hide away if he didn’t want to see it. It wasn’t quite right but it was acceptable and with night already fallen, a winter’s early dark, she needed to be done. She let the store owner wrap it for her. Letting her hands rest on it for too long seemed like it would make it more a talisman than she intended. She thought she would be done then, able to call an Uber and head home to her empty apartment, the packing she needed to do before she left for Manchester, the last of the white wine, ramen unnecessary but still comforting—but walking out, the door jingling behind her, she felt unsettled and let herself walk in the next store, the one she’d looked into earlier, let herself buy the supple Italian-made gloves in the size she knew would fit Jed, her eye familiar with his hands from surgeries he’d assisted her at, the way one curved around his favorite mug, how it had felt in her hand when she helped him up from the ice. She had the saleswoman wrap the package and directed it to be sent to his office, the card brief though clear, addressed to him, signed by her. She didn’t know what he would make of the gift; she didn’t know what to make of it herself, not exactly, or she didn’t want to know.

Mitchell would have laughed at her for heading into the hospital before she started the drive to New Hampshire; George would have smirked, Caroline reminded her to grab an extra-tall latte for the road. Henry would have sighed, if he was still sighing at her anymore, if he hadn’t started looking around, anywhere else, to prevent her from seeing the tired exasperation in his eyes. She went in anyway, just to make sure she’d left everything tucked, that there wasn’t some chart left to sign or a last-minute question from Sam Diggs, who was covering for her in exchange for New Year’s Eve. She smiled at people but without her white coat, with her hair loose and the glasses she wore when she didn’t have to worry about needing contacts for microsurgery perched on her nose, there was less recognition, fewer greetings and far fewer requests for anything. She gave a wave to Isabella, playing checkers with TJ while the boy waited for his mother to come visit, and made it to her office without many detours. She found a few charts that could have waited her vacation to be signed and stuffed the latest issue of _Surgery_ in her bag before she saw it in the corner, leaning against the wall. It was wrapped but even the brightest, most obnoxious reindeer patterned paper couldn’t disguise what was within; she still tore at the paper to reveal the hockey stick, the Eve logo bright against the sleek, dark shaft, the apple bitten.

It wasn’t from Henry; she knew that even if she hadn’t already opened the gift he’d left her, a guide to hiking trails in New England she was glad to have unwrapped alone, without any good-natured, snarky commentary from her brothers, her sister’s appraising glance, her mother’s insistent cheeriness about how much good a hike did for the body and soul. It was from Jed, as she’d known the instant she saw it in the corner, before she opened the card, the conversation at the Frog Pond coming back to her, the expression in his eyes and how she’d kept talking and talking, surprising them both. The card was handwritten, his regular, dashed-off handwriting that she recognized from the Post-its he left scattered in the lounge, remarkably legible for a doctor and one as impatient as he could be. The message was brief,

“ _M,_  
Loving something is enough.  
\--J.”

She sat at her desk, the hockey stick half-unwrapped, awkwardly stretched across her lap and her eyes filled with tears; she set her glasses on the desk and closed her eyes. She kept them shut as if it could postpone the full realization of what she had been avoiding—she might still love Henry, but she had fallen in love with Jed Foster and it seemed entirely likely he felt the same way about her. What the fuck she was going to do about it, that she couldn’t begin to articulate but she understood she’d have to face it and soon. She’d never had a gift make her feel so many ways, so much and she thought, if Henry was the one, she would have felt this way already, would have recognized what was happening. She decided to leave the hockey stick propped in the corner of the room but she took the card with her, to consider what to do, to trace the loops of the L and the g with her finger, imaging his hand, his intent, his response before she acted. Jed could wait, perhaps; she could not.

**Author's Note:**

> I started this when the prompt was "cookies" and now it's ended up serving for "shop" and "brothers and sisters" in the Mercy Street Holiday 2016 Prompt-a-thon. It is a continuation of "The Mob Within the Heart" and if I end up coming up with another, I'll link them in a universe. I've given Mary a new sibling, never before seen in fandom, Mitchell and two friends, Rachel and Devin, because I got tired of coming up with ways to repurpose the existing characters in the show :) I thought Steinbeck would suit Henry, given Steinbeck's interest in human suffering and Henry's canon and fanon identities. Jed has bought Mary the most expensive ice hockey stick I could find, the Eve Metamorphic hockey stick. It's not quite a gift of the Magi scenario, since they can both really use the gifts they've bought each other. The book she considers for Jed is about Padua because it was a center of medical innovation in the Renaissance or thereabouts.
> 
> The title is from Emily Dickinson.


End file.
